In order to succeed in today's highly competitive environment, organizations have to improve their costs, speed, efficiency, and customer experience in delivering their products and services. Recent success stories in supply chain management (SCM) showed that organizations adopting successful SCM processes and practices to improve their performance in these areas can gain significant advantages over their competitors.
With the advances in communication and internet technologies, new direct marketing and sales channels have grown more popular among customers over the past two decades. Contact centers, web sites, and social media are among the new direct marketing and sales channels currently used by organizations. More traditional sales channels include direct sales teams, stores, dealerships, and channel partners. Besides price advantages, the convenience of being able to shop wherever and whenever they choose to is an attractive feature that customers are now expecting in buying products and services.
These new channels are different in nature than more traditional sales channels such as direct sales teams and in-store sales in that the new sales channels usually involve processes that are traditionally not considered among the SCM processes. Processes needed for the management of these new sales channels, however, affect sales, and the orders received by a supply chain.
In successful organizations, sales teams as well as stores are connected with the rest of the supply chain. Direct sales channels such as contact centers and web sites are also a part of the extended supply chain and their planning needs to be coordinated with the planning of the entire supply chain.
Traditionally, SCM uses the historical data on past customer orders, and information provided by sales teams and customers to forecast future orders for products and services. By analyzing historical data, and information from sales teams and customers regarding potential future orders, supply chain managers can identify a plurality of customer buying patterns including trends and seasonality, and adjust their forecasts for the latest information available on their customers' needs. Supply chain managers may also use other information such as data on industry trends, and economic indicators.
Forecasts made by an organization for its products and services are shared with its suppliers to plan their activities and orders. Forecasts and supply availability information are also shared with customers.
When products and services are ordered through contact centers and web sites besides the traditional channels such as sales teams and stores, organizations can improve the effectiveness of their plans by integrating their supply chain and contact center activities. This integration allows SCM to capture and use the information available at contact centers that affect future customer orders.